7 common Magento SEO mistakes

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When dealing with Magento store’s SEO, these are the 7 most common basic mistakes I encounter. Some of these are inherited from the development stage of your projects. I hope this checklist will be useful for anyone launching a new store or checking their live site:

1. Homepage title “home”

If I had a dollar for every Magento store out there I’ve seen with a homepage title “home” I’d be a rich man. The homepage is usually a CMS page. Go in there and change the title of the page into something more suitable such as “Blue Widgets Online Store – Example.com”.

2. Using “default description” field

System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Default description – Leave this blank or you’ll have such a mess of duplicate descriptions on your store that don’t really describe the given URL that it will be unbelievable. Also, please make sure your meta keywords are not “magento, magento commerce” etc.

3. Not turning on rel=canonical

Save yourself from lots of duplicate content issues. Turn canonicals on for both products and categories.

4. Logo title and/or alt “Magento Commerce”

Logo, usually in the top left of your website. Don’t have it say “Magento Commerce”. I’ve seen that a lot of times.

5. Forgetting to turn meta robots to “index, follow” and remove robots.txt disallow after a move from staging/dev site to the live site

93 comments

Number 8 – Not enabling canonical tag on root/homepage. Magento doesn’t offer this native functionality and needs to be added to the code manually.
Number 9 – Not removing /home from the XML sitemap. Without the homepage canonical tag or a NOINDEX command you’ve advertised to Google that /home is a page you want indexing and is often a carbon copy of /.
Number 10 – Not removing .html from your URLs. Simply replace this suffix with a / in config to tidy up your page URLs.
And so forth…

You should also set up 301 redirect so that those pages dont exist for the visitor. Did you check other variations as well such as www and non-www version of the same?
n eCommerce website being deprived in SEO approach can’t expect good visibility anymore; tips shown herein sound pretty much valuable! (Isn’t it good to follow something that is to us is a proven result?). Facts displayed on homepage title, description (yes, Meta keywords & logo saying no “Magento”), canonicalization, sitemaps (with no sample products) and much more – just seems to get highly optimized by search engines (and reversibly, suiting to searchers’ queries) so far.

Hi Toni
Can you please tell how to remove my no follow social link from my magneto ecommerce Eclipse theme?
Because in my footer social link option i can only put my url, there is no any option to edit it, and my all social link on my store footer showing no follow attribute.

hi have gone by your video to put seo on my site and have gone to google crawl url.how long will it take for it to show up on google 2 week still not a thing showing up is there other videos that i could look at i went of the seo starters video

Great Article!! I’m having some really bad duplicate content issues with my store. I have removed the index.php from all the URL’s as this was causing some issues, but I see that the sitemap.xml’s output is still including the index.php URL’s for sitemap. Any Idea how to omit the “index.php” from the sitemap’s URL??

I’ve 3 Magento stores, but I’m facing a problem with one of them. When I search on Google “Name of my store” the first result of my Magento store is from a CMS page and no my home page, as it supposes to be.

I’ve checked everything as listes here, update my robots.txt, update sitemap and upload it to Google Webmasters, but no way… The first result is a CMS page… Could anyone give me glue?

I shared a post on FB for my site, kmtactical.net It pulled up the page header image, but under the image, it included a “product description” which read, “Beats for sale – Hip Hop – R&B – POP – Club Music. Any help to adjust this to ready actual item phrases?

It is unlikely that adding an extension will result in Magento speed improvement. Maybe removing some 🙂

There could be a 100 different things that are causing your Magento based online store to be slow. To determine which factors are affecting your speed the most and how to improve it, I’d suggest a Magento technical audit.

These can either add to the keyword use IF needed OR add terms not used elsewhere. Remember that they are used as image titles so they need to make sense. ALT tags are also good general practice

Comment on SEO #1: I’ve seen both amateurs and professionals use page titles poorly (Title = Home, Welcome, Index, and NOTHING). Authors of page building systems never stress this or include prompts telling the new user -THIS IS HOW GOOGLE WILL LIST YOUR WEB SITE!

An eCommerce website being deprived in SEO approach can’t expect good visibility anymore; tips shown herein sound pretty much valuable! (Isn’t it good to follow something that is to us is a proven result?). Facts displayed on homepage title, description (yes, Meta keywords & logo saying no “Magento”), canonicalization, sitemaps (with no sample products) and much more – just seems to get highly optimized by search engines (and reversibly, suiting to searchers’ queries) so far.

SEO-friendly eCommerce platform would rather mean optimizing the products, whatsoever sold along the website, in an effort for search engines and therefore the end users to see and follow.

Spencer Yao says something very clever about it. Powerful SEO features will hence include SEO-approachable URLs, Meta Data, Page Title, Sitemap, Easy-to-Follow Navigation Structure and much more as listed here.

Yes, how Analytical tools’ been helpful to promotions, should be well understood and utilized. An importance of higher site performance with good loading speed should also stay uncompromised – and something more and more to go along…

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